[[link removed]]

MILITARISM ABUSE DISORDER  
[[link removed]]


 

Frida Berrigan
September 24, 2024
Tom Dispatch [[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ A Very American Malaise _

Christening of the USS Carl Levin, (DDG 120)

 

My name is Frida and my community is military dependent. (I feel, by
the way, like I’m introducing myself at a very strange AA-like
meeting with lousy coffee.) As with people who have substance abuse
disorders, I’m part of a very large club. After all, there are
weapons manufacturers and subcontractors in just about
[[link removed]] every
congressional district in the country
[[link removed]],
so that members of Congress will never forget whom they are really
working for: the military-industrial complex.

Using the vernacular of the day, perhaps it’s particularly on target
to say that our whole country suffers from Militarism Abuse Disorder
or (all too appropriately) MAD.

I must confess that I don’t like to admit to my military dependency.
Who does? In my case, it’s a tough one for a few reasons, the
biggest being that I’m an avowed pacifist who believes that war is a
crime against humanity, a failure of the imagination, and never
(no, _not ever_) necessary. Along with the rest of my family of five,
I live below the taxable income
[[link removed]] level.
That way, we don’t pay into a system
[[link removed]] that
funds war preparations and war-making. We have to be a little creative
to make our money stretch further and we don’t eat out or go to the
movies every week. But we don’t ever feel deprived as a result. In
essence, I’ve traded career success and workplace achievement for
a slightly clearer conscience
[[link removed]] and
time — time to work to end militarism and break our collective
addiction!

The Peter G. Peterson Foundation estimates
[[link removed]] that,
in 2023, the United States of America spent $142 billion buying
weapons systems and another $122 billion on the research and
development of future weaponry and other militarized equipment. And
keep in mind that those big numbers represent only a small fraction of
any Pentagon budget, the latest of which the Pentagon’s proposing to
be $849.8 billion
[[link removed]] for
2025 — and that’s just one year (and not all of what passes
[[link removed]] for “national
defense” spending either). A recent analysis by the Costs of War
Project at Brown University calculated
[[link removed]] that,
since September 11, 2001, the United States has used an estimated $8
trillion-plus just for its post-9/11 wars. Talk about addiction! It
makes me pretty MAD, if I’m being honest with you!

It would be nice to ignore such monstrous numbers and the even bigger
implications they suggest, to unfocus my eyes slightly as I regularly
drive by the fenced facilities, manicured office parks, and noisy,
bustling shipyards that make up the mega-billion-dollar-a-year
industry right in my own neighborhood that’s preparing for… well,
yes… the end of the world. Instead, I’m trying to be clear-eyed
and aware. I’m checking my personal life all the time for compromise
or conciliation with militarism: Am I being brainwashed when I find
myself cheering for the fighters in that blockbuster movie we splurged
on? Am I doing enough to push for a ceasefire in Gaza? Am I showing up
with young people in my community who are backing higher salaries for
teachers and no more police in schools? And of course, I keep asking
myself: How are my daily consumer decisions lining up with my lofty
politics?

I don’t always like the answers that come up in response to such
questions, but I keep asking them, keep trying, keep pushing. Those
who suffer from Militarism Abuse Disorder can’t even ask the
questions, because they’re distracted by the promises of good jobs,
nice apartments, and cheap consumer goods that the military-industrial
complex is always claiming are right around the corner.

But here in my community, they never deliver!

NEW LONDON: A PROFILE OF MILITARISM ABUSE DISORDER

New London 
[[link removed]]is
a town of fewer than 28,000 people. The median income here is a little
over $46,000 — $32,000 less than the state average. We are a
very old community
[[link removed]]. Long part of
the fishing and hunting grounds of the Eastern Pequots,
[[link removed]] Nehantics
[[link removed]], Mashantucket Pequot
[[link removed]], and Mohegan
[[link removed]], the city was founded in the 1600s and
incorporated in the late 1700s. You see evidence of our age in the
shape of our streets, curbed and meandering, long ago carved out of
fields by cows and wagons, and in our architecture — aging
industrial buildings, warehouses, and ice houses in the neighborhoods
where their workers once lived — now derelict and empty or
repurposed as auto repair stores or barber shops.

Sometimes I watch, almost mesmerized by the ferocious energy of all
those cars careening up Howard Street on their way to work at General
Dynamics [[link removed]]. Car after car headed for work at the
very break of day. Every workday at about 3 p.m., they reverse course,
a river of steel and plastic rushing and then idling in traffic,
trying to get out of town as fast as possible.

General Dynamics Electric Boat repairs, services, and manufactures
submarines armed with both conventional and nuclear weapons. And it
certainly tells you something about our world that the company is in
the midst of a major hiring jag,
[[link removed]] looking
to fill thousands of positions in New London, Groton, and coastal
Rhode Island to build the Columbia-class
[[link removed]] submarine, the next generation of
nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed subs. Those behemoths of human
ingenuity and engineering will cost taxpayers
[[link removed]] a
whopping $132 billion, with each of the 12 new boats clocking in at
about $15 billion — and mind you, that’s before anything even goes
wrong or the schedule to produce them predictably stretches out and
out. The company has already solved one big problem: how to wring
maximum profits
[[link removed]] out
of this next generation of planet-obliteration-capable subs. And
that’s a problem that isn’t even particularly hard to sort out,
because some of those contracts
[[link removed]] are
“cost plus,” meaning the company
[[link removed]] says
what the project costs and then adds a percentage on top of that as
profit.

Such a cost-plus business bothers me a lot. I could _almost_ be
converted into a hard-nosed militarist if our weapons production
industry was a nonprofit set of organizations, run with the kind of
shoestring ingenuity that dozens of outfits in New London employ to
feed the hungry, house the homeless, and care for the victims of
domestic violence.

I break from my traffic-watching fugue on Howard Street to reflect on
all that furious effort, all those advanced degrees, all that almost
impossible intelligence being poured into making an even better,
bigger, faster, sleeker, stealthier weapons-delivery system, capable
of carrying and firing conventional and nuclear warheads. Why? We
have so many already
[[link removed]]. And as
the only nation that has ever used nuclear weapons in war (in 1945)
and has tested
[[link removed]],
perfected, and helped proliferate
[[link removed]] the
technology of ultimate destruction for the last eight decades, the
United States should be leading the charge to denuclearize, disarm,
and abolish such weaponry. That, after all, is what’s called for in
the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons
[[link removed]].

If we are ever going to break our MAD addiction, one place to start is
here on Howard Street with people who make their living working on one
tiny component of this incredibly complex system. Economic conversion
[[link removed]],
moving resources and skills and jobs from the military-industrial
complex to civilian sectors, is a big project. And it could indeed
begin right here on Howard Street.

YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR

Our small town is also home to the Coast Guard Academy and two private
colleges. Add the acreage of those three non-taxpaying institutions to
the nearly 30 churches, synagogues, and other houses of worship that
enjoy tax-free status here; throw in the dozens of nonprofits that do
all the good work and you end up with an awfully small tax base. As
a result, the municipal budget leans heavily on commercial taxpayers
like General Dynamics Electric Boat [[link removed]], the
military-industrial behemoth that moved into 24 acres of prime
waterfront real estate in 2009 after it was vacated by the tax
scofflaw Pfizer
[[link removed]].

General Dynamics, like other military manufacturers, essentially only
has one customer to please, the United States government. That makes
the cost-plus contracting scheme even more egregious, guaranteeing
that, no matter what goes wrong, its profits are always assured. Such
a bonkers, counter-capitalist scenario passes all the costs on to
American taxpayers and allows the privately held corporation to pocket
all the profits, while handing out fat dividends to its shareholders.
According to Sahm Capitol
[[link removed]],
“Over the past three years, General Dynamics’ Earnings Per Share
grew by 3.7% and over the past three years, the total shareholder
return was 62%.”

For 2024, General Dynamics Electric Boat is paying taxes on property
valued at $90.8 million — almost twice as much as that of the next
highest taxpayer in our town. But it is also a bone of contention. The
company, which paid CEO Phebe Novakovic
[[link removed]] $22.5 million in salary and stock
awards in 2023, has no trouble taking the City of New London to court
when they feel like their property is being overvalued or overtaxed.
They win, too, so their property valuations yo-yo year to year when
New London has been ordered to repay taxes to General Dynamics.
Whether they pay taxes based on $90.8 million in property or $57
million doesn’t really matter to the company. It’s literal pocket
change to the Pentagon’s third largest weapons contractor
[[link removed]],
a company that boasted $42.3 billion in revenue in 2023. But it
matters a lot in a place like New London, where the annual budget
process routinely shaves jobs from the schools, public works, and the
civil service to make the columns all add up.

According to a report 
[[link removed]]by
Heidi Garrett-Peltier for the Costs of War Project at Brown
University, $1 million of federal spending in the military sector
creates 6.9 jobs (5.8 direct jobs and 1.1 in the supply chain). That
same $1 million would create 8.4 jobs in the wind energy sector or 9.5
jobs in solar energy. Investing $1 million in energy efficiency
retrofits creates 10.6 jobs. Use that $1 million to build streets or
highways or tunnels or bridges or to repair schools and it will create
“over 40 percent more jobs than the military, with a total
multiplier of 9.8 jobs per $1 million spending.”

Wait, what? Are you telling me that, with their lack of transparency,
accountability, and their cost-plus contracts, while building weapons
systems for the sole purpose of destruction and wasting a lot of money
in the process, the military-industrial complex is a lousy job
creator? Am I to understand that spending money on just
about _anything_ else creates more jobs and more economic activity,
while not threatening the world with annihilation?

As I work on a local level in my small town in Connecticut, I see how
municipal policy should prioritize small businesses, mom-and-pop
stores made of brick and mortar, over multinational corporations or
big business. I see the return on investment from a small business in
granular and tangible ways: the grocery store owner who starts each
day by picking up garbage in his parking lot, the funeral home that
sponsors the Little League team, the woman at the art gallery and
frame shop who waters the street flowers, or the self-employed local
photographer who serves on the board of the cooperative grocery store.

These businesses don’t employ tens of thousands of people, but they
also don’t insist on tax abatements that undermine our local budget
or fill our crowded streets with commuters hell-bent on getting away
from the office and our town as quickly as possible.

You get what you pay for, right? Garrett-Peltier’s Costs of War
report goes on to note that “healthcare spending creates more than
twice as many jobs for the same level of spending, while education
creates up to nearly three times as many jobs as defense spending…
The employment multipliers for these domestic programs are 14.3 for
healthcare, 19.2 for primary and secondary education, and 11.2 for
higher education; the average figure for education is 15.2 jobs per $1
million spending.”

These are numbers I wish my City Council would commit to memory. In
fact, we should all know these numbers by heart, because they counter
the dominant narrative that military spending is good for the economy
and that good-paying jobs depend on militarism.

The United States is investing trillions of dollars in the military,
as well as in weapons contractors like General Dynamics, Boeing, and
Lockheed Martin. Every U.S. president in modern history has
prioritized the bottom lines of those corporations over a safe and
healthy future for the next generation. Consider all of that as just
so many symptoms of Militarism Abuse Syndrome. Isn’t it finally time
to get really mad at MAD? Let’s kick the habit and get clean!

Copyright 2024 Frida Berrigan

_Frida Berrigan is the author of It Runs In The Family: On Being
Raised by Radicals and Growing into Rebellious Motherhood
[[link removed]].
She is a T
[[link removed]]omDispatch regular
[[link removed]], writes occasionally
for WagingNonviolence.Org [[link removed]], and serves
on the Board of Kirkridge Retreat and Study Center
[[link removed]]. She has three children and lives in New
London, Connecticut, where she is a gardener and community organizer._

* military industrial complex
[[link removed]]
* military spending
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]